"Well Jon told me to keep quiet while we were having lunch with Donald and Vladimir"

Now I am wondering what they had for lunch?

A bucket of KFC and some coke, what else?Maybe a BigMac for desert.

Jokes apart! well DT for one have admitted they want a " fair" game giving new contributors a fair chance to earn money!....how do you think they mastermind that? if not by some sort of capping?? taking from the rich to give to the poor thingy you know or pushing newbies right up front in the search and thereby pushing down some established!

Either way its a form of capping no matter how you look upon it!

This is how the capping history has been written.

something went wrong with the text here?

I don't know what went wrong with your quote, but I know what went wrong with your logic: this is not a DreamsTime thread, but a Shutterstock thread.

Major difference, don't you think? One is very successful, the other one is struggling hard to compete. Don't you wonder why*?

Well DT was just an example of that agencies can gear the search the direction they want to! and NO I'm not wondering why. I know the people at DT very, very well and they are not trying to compete with SS, they run their own race so to speak.

Trying to compete with SS nowadays means you have to accept every tom, dick, harry with a smartphone into the agency just to fill up with gazillions of files and just for the sake of it, nothing else!...few years back it was an achievement to get into SS, people had to prove themselves. Today? haha! just look at it like a giant Flea-market!

Their own race? On a different planet, or what?In case you didn't realise it yet: they are competing for the same customers and they are racing against SS & Co, since inception.

Reality is that SS is very succesful at it, while DT, with their fair share wealth re-distribution socialistic strategy is struggling, big time, to stay afloat.

If by any chance, you really know them, it doeasn't play in their advantage.

Besides, it is the other way around, DT has always accepted everything, no question asked, while SS has relaxed their acceptance criteria much recently. If SS is a flea-market, then the whole market si a flea-market. Better accept it and move on, instead of ranting non-stop about it with your Q cult worshipers

It is! the whole market is a flea-market only some fleas are more expensive then others like the RM-flea! yeah we're burning black candles in the Q cult, didnt you know!

Shutterstock definitely has a search algorithm where they control a contributors earnings.

Can anyone tell if it is based on the number of sales?

I am thinking of deleting all my photos and just having videos with which I earn more.

Maybe the photos should be in a different account.

Any thoughts?

Do you mean that Shutterstock tries to decide how many money we can earn in a month?

if you mean that, this could be possible, I notice something similar about minimum earnings I have every month on the picture sales.This could be fair for everyone, to give to each contributor its piece of cake, depending on his commitment.

everyone can tell if their earnings have a linear trend with a "minimum guarantee" or it's totally random ?

Shutterstock definitely has a search algorithm where they control a contributors earnings.

Can anyone tell if it is based on the number of sales?

I am thinking of deleting all my photos and just having videos with which I earn more.

Maybe the photos should be in a different account.

Any thoughts?

Do you mean that Shutterstock tries to decide how many money we can earn in a month?

if you mean that, this could be possible, I notice something similar about minimum earnings I have every month on the picture sales.This could be fair for everyone, to give to each contributor its piece of cake, depending on his commitment.

everyone can tell if their earnings have a linear trend with a "minimum guarantee" or it's totally random ?

How do they set the minimum? Derek says it's one number, somebody else another, some higher some lower, not by number of pictures. If that's random it should change not be capped or the same. Or maybe we earn by the quality of our work and there is no cap.

I think that each contributor has a rank, depending of some variables like: number of files, acceptance rate and sales.

the "minimum guarantee" of earning can be influenced by the search algorithm, to set your pictures in first page or not.

obviously, they can only influence it to help you to reach a minimum cap, but it cannot be for sure, anyway for my pictures: I see a constant earning for many months with a slight increase in earning, increasing the uploads.

for my videos they are not constant, each month is very different in sales.